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May 21, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
50:31
TEDx： the Mangina Chronicles
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So I'm going to start this video by saying I fucking hate clickbait.
I hate it.
I hate a title that goes something like a TED talk that might turn every man who watches it into a feminist.
It's pretty fantastic.
And it's just like, wow, wow, that was an unnecessary waste of wordage.
Just fucking get to your point in 10 words or less.
But not only that, it's disingenuous.
It's, hey, is this this?
You won't know until you give us that click that gives our metrics a nice boost.
Well, fuck you, man.
You know, I want to know what the actual thing's about.
I don't want to know vagueness about it, so I have to then investigate it nine out of ten times to find that it's complete bullshit and I'm not interested in this in the slightest.
You've wasted my time for your own gain.
Fuck you.
And at the end of the day, you've misrepresented this anyway.
It's not a TED talk, it's TEDx talk, which means it's bullshit.
But anyway, let's carry on.
TEDxFDWomen Don't know what that is?
Let's have a look.
TEDx Fee D women.
Committed to freeing and elevating the voices of women worldwide.
Not even surprised.
Not even going to point out the double standards.
Let's carry on.
Oh, one thing though, they do charge $75 a ticket to go to these events.
Before I begin my presentation, I want to say it's a great honor for me to be part of a program with so many impressive women.
Begin by stroking women's egos.
Start as you mean to go on.
I also want to say, and thank you to the organizers to invite me to be part of this.
It's important that I say and that men say when we do the work that we do.
Yep, men work.
Got it.
That is what the statistics say.
Go on.
Especially in the field of gender violence prevention that I'm going to talk with you about this morning.
Obviously, I didn't make myself clear enough.
I hate ambiguous and misleading titles.
It's not gender violence prevention.
It's preventing men from being violent to women.
You are not interested in women who are violent to men.
But it doesn't matter to you.
You're concerned about men and what they do to women.
Go on.
It's important that we acknowledge that the growing movement of men in the United States in a multicultural sense and all around the world in an international sense.
I never knew that mangina-ism was a movement.
I imagine you'll be speaking out very shortly.
The growing movement of men who are standing up and speaking out about men's violence against women and going into parts of male culture that have historically been either apathetic about or openly hostile to women's efforts to engage them.
That's nothing to do with violence against women at all.
These are male spaces designed for male activities.
And they're called male activities because mainly men do them.
There's no reason that women would try and engage here.
And normal, sensible women, like for example my girlfriend, say, no, no, no, that's nothing to do with me.
You go and have a good time.
I'll see you when you get back.
The problem is feminists.
And they're absolute meddling tentacles that have to get into everything and infect it to basically control the sort of social dialogue.
It's kind of a cultural hegemony that they're aiming for.
And I'm not having any of it.
Fuck them.
Fuck you.
And fuck off.
That movement of men is indebted to the leadership of women.
That was odd.
Let's hear that again.
That movement of men is indebted to the leadership of women.
It's like that was a trigger for him.
And that brought up a terrible and painful memory.
On a personal level, on a professional level, on a political level, on an intellectual level, on every level, women built these movements.
Ah, yes.
In the same way that all men build all houses.
No, feminists built these movements.
It just so happens that feminists are predominantly women.
That doesn't mean that women as a whole built these movements.
You disingenuous twat.
And these are movements that are affecting in a positive way everybody.
Not just women and girls, but also men and boys.
Well, as a man, I can tell you that this is not affecting me positively.
It's affecting me negatively.
So your statement is false.
And oftentimes, men like myself get a lot of credit and public acclaim for doing the work that women have been doing for a long time.
You can take credit for the things you have done.
So one of the ways that we can use the spotlight is to thank women and honor women's leadership.
Bossiness.
Going forward today, tomorrow, and into the future.
Now.
Having said that, I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence.
Sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, that whole range of issues that I'll refer to in shorthand as gender violence issues.
Oh, the current paradigm that says women are always brilliant and men are always evil and useless.
Well, I'm looking forward to changing that paradigm.
Let's hear what you have to say.
They've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with.
But I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it.
I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with.
In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost.
If your propaganda didn't affect me, I wouldn't make this video.
They are men's issues as well, but not for the reasons you're going to state.
Now, obviously.
Obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that.
Listen, dude, calm down.
You've been licking their assholes for the past five minutes.
You don't need to backtrack and be like, oh, no, no, but they are still women's issues.
You fucking coward.
Stick to your point.
But calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem for a number of reasons.
The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention.
So the first isn't that it excludes male victims of domestic violence perpetrated by females then.
It's not that it excludes male rape victims of female rapists then.
It's not that it excludes male children who are the victims of female paedophiles then.
Right?
A lot of men hear the term women's issues and we tend to tune it out and we think, hey, I'm a guy.
That's for the girls or that's for the women.
And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result.
It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction when we hear the term women's issues.
Yeah, generally because this is an invitation for a woman to go on at length about her feelings.
That's the problem.
They sit there and go, well, I feel that this is really important.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And when you finally get to the end of them speaking, there is one response.
Well, it's a good thing it's fucking illegal already then, isn't it?
This is also true, by the way, of the word gender, because a lot of people hear the word gender and they think it means women.
So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women's issues.
That is because assholes like you continuously use them as synonyms.
No one ever talks about actual men's issues when they say gender issues.
They always, always, without fail, talk about women's issues.
Therefore, everyone's like, well, gender issues just means women's issues because they only ever talk about women's issues when someone says gender issues.
So that must be what it fucking means.
Some confusion about the term gender.
And actually, let me illustrate that confusion by way of analogy.
So let's talk for a moment about race.
In the US, when we hear the word race, a lot of people think that means African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on.
A lot of people, when they hear the word sexual orientation, think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual.
And a lot of people, when they hear the word gender, think it means women.
In each case, the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to, right?
As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity or belong to some racial category or construct.
As if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation.
As if men don't have a gender.
Whoa, slow down there, mate, because you are losing the social justice crowd at the moment.
I can feel them in the audience pulling back and I know what they're thinking.
Did this heteronormative, cisgendered white man just suggest that cisgendered, heterosexual white men are a group in themselves and don't deserve to be called scum and oppressors?
Because that sounds like oppression.
You piece of shit.
This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves, which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege.
The ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection.
Oh, the irony.
And in fact, being rendered invisible in large measure in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us.
And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence, how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men.
What kind of bullshit is that?
In your narrative, men are the great evil antagonist.
They are the skeletal of this story.
They are sat on a throne of skulls, throwing their head back and cackling with glee as the noble women try desperately to resist.
Oh, just fuck off, you prick.
And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using the old tech.
I'm old school on some fundamental regards.
I work with, I make films and I work with, you know, high-tech, but I'm still old school as an educator.
And I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence structure level how the way that we think, literally, the way that we use language conspires to keep our attention off of men.
Another way of saying that would be the language we use conspires to make it all about women.
This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogs.
This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.
Oh, I'm sure that it'll be completely rational and balanced then.
You know, it's in no way going to be swayed by the bias of a fat man-hating lesbian.
It starts with a very basic English sentence.
John beat Mary.
That's a good English sentence.
John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object.
Good sentence.
Yep, that is a good representation of how men treat women.
That is entirely correct.
There is no other sentence there that could have been used.
It couldn't have been John helps Mary.
It could only be John beat Mary.
Only.
Possibly murder or possibly raped, but certainly only pejorative verbs.
Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice.
Mary was beaten by John.
And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence.
We've gone from John beat Mary to Mary was beaten by John.
We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary.
So?
And you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence.
Well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plane.
The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have Mary was beaten.
And now it's all about Mary.
We're not even thinking about John.
It's totally focused on Mary.
Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with beaten is battered.
So we have Mary was battered.
And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, Mary is a battered woman.
So now Mary's very identity, Mary is a battered woman, is what was done to her by John in the first instance.
But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.
You're a fucking idiot.
You say this like it's some sort of great revelation.
That if you change the subject of the sentence to the object of the previous sentence, the subject of the first sentence is less important.
This is the fucking stupidest bit of nonsense I've ever seen.
Yeah, John beat Mary.
John is a beater of Mary.
John is a wife beater.
John is violent.
Do you see how you could have kept on John and made John the entire subject of all of this, but instead you didn't.
You went, okay, well, we'll talk about what Mary does.
But the thing is, this is so ingrained that women should be the focus.
Women are more important.
They must be the central thing that everyone talks about.
That is your problem.
You cannot see what you have done because you naturally assume that obviously the women should be talked about most, even though in this case it's John's terrible actions that you should be focusing on.
I know this video is going on quite long, but everything he says is fucking stupid.
Also, he said, Mary's entire identity is as a battered woman.
Well, ultimately, mate, John's entire identity is as a wife beater.
Do you understand?
This is what such a reductive sentence does.
Now, those of us who work in domestic and sexual violence field know that victim blaming is pervasive in this realm, which is to say blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it.
And we say things like, why do these women go out with these men?
Why are they attracted to these men?
Why do they keep going back?
That's not victim blaming.
They are genuinely good questions as to why women seem to display such masochistic tendencies.
There are women out there who will be hit by their boyfriends and then justify it or excuse it.
It's not unreasonable to ask why do they keep doing it?
Why do they go to these men in the first place?
They chose this man.
No one forced them.
They are the architects of their own misery in this situation.
I'm not saying that that excuses the man for being violent.
If you can't see the difference, then you're a fucking idiot.
Okay, yeah, I know that you can't see the difference.
All right.
What was she wearing at that party?
What a stupid thing to do.
Why was she drinking with that group of guys in that hotel room?
That is actually a pretty good question.
This is victim blaming.
And there are numerous reasons for it.
But one of them is that our whole cognitive structure is set up to blame victims.
It's all unconscious.
Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, and wearing.
Yeah, the problem is that women talk about themselves too much.
And I'm going to stand by that.
Every woman talks about themselves too much.
This is why, in a sentence involving a woman, you can change it to involve only the woman.
And you think it's completely natural and it's ingrained into our psyche because men don't matter.
And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women.
Okay, it's a legitimate thing to ask.
But let's be clear.
Asking questions about Mary is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing violence.
Why does Mary keep going back to her abusive boyfriend John?
Oh, no, that won't get us anywhere solving the problem.
We have to ask a different set of questions.
You can see where I'm going with this, right?
The questions are not about Mary, they're about John.
The questions include things like, why does John beat Mary?
No, that is the question.
That is the only question one needs to ask.
Now, let's examine this.
Why does John beat Mary?
Is Mary sat there knitting, you know, humming a little tune, going, oh, I wonder if I should bake John a cake today?
And then John walks up to him and says, Mary, they say, yes, dear, bang, straight in the face.
Is that what happened?
Because I'm guessing that that's what you think happened.
Perhaps Mary was out picking daisies, or maybe she was cleaning the kitchen, or, you know, maybe she was dressing herself in lingerie so she could give him a nice time or something.
And then John was just like, fuck's sake, Mary, come here, what?
Bam!
Fucking, I realize I hadn't punched you today.
No, of course not.
What you don't understand is that men who beat women, and I'm not trying to make excuses, I'm trying to find the actual reasons for it, right?
It doesn't begin out of nowhere.
And it never just starts with a fist to the face.
Like all things, it builds.
It's like a cauldron with a lid on it and it's boiling.
And there's pressure inside and there's pressure inside.
And eventually the lid flies off because the pressure's too much.
That's what's happening.
Mary is not being in any way concerned about John's feelings.
She's probably up in his face, screaming at him.
She may well have initiated the violence first.
But the problem Mary has is that she can't finish the violence.
And that's the only thing.
That's the only thing these days.
You know, something like 70% of domestic violence is initiated by women.
And it's just like, really?
You know, if violence is going to be used, women are the ones who are likely to initiate it.
And so when John gets to the point where she is not listening to him, and yet she's in his face, she's going on, she's screaming, she might be smashing his stuff, she might be physically abusing him, and then John's a man.
We all know that men are far more physical than women.
And we all know that women can emotionally abuse men.
Alright?
And so, if John is suddenly at the point where he loses it and he smacks Mary in the face, and suddenly, oh, Mary's a beaten woman, but that doesn't say anything about the suffering of John, who has obviously been under a tremendous amount of stress to get to this point.
Because at the end of the day, what I'm really, really sick of is this dichotomy.
Men are evil.
Women are not.
Men beat.
Women are victims.
You know, it's not that simple.
No one is evil.
John hates himself as much as you hate John.
Because Mary doesn't hate John.
She's going to go right back to him because she's a fucking idiot.
But I don't even think she's a fucking idiot.
I think these women go back to these men because they know that they have provoked them.
And when they're like, he loves me, really, he does.
But she has deliberately wound him up to the point where she knows what he's going to end up like, but she doesn't anyway.
And then they go back and they make up and, you know, they bring it on themselves when these things happen.
Now, I'm not saying that that's the only case.
And I'm not saying there aren't women who are, you know, abused by men who are genuinely abusive because of their parents or mothers or whatever.
You know, it always, everything has a history.
But this sort of, oh, a man has hit a woman, you know, if these things do happen, then generally there is a fucking good reason for them happening.
And disingenuous pillocks like you are not interested in that reason.
You think that, you know, one, you know, you think that as soon as something happens, you can delineate into good and bad.
And that's not the case.
Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the United States and all over the world?
What's going on?
Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, and other verbally, in other ways, the women and girls and the men and boys that they claim to love?
What's going on with men?
Not only is it only men, but it is all men.
All men do this or have the potential for it.
No women do it, and they certainly don't have any potential for it.
Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and little boys?
I don't know.
Why are there so many female paedophiles who do the same thing, but get off scot-free?
Why is that a common problem in our society and all over the world today?
Well, how common is it?
Is it like one in ten?
One in five?
One in two?
One?
Why?
Why do we hear over and over again about new scandals erupting in major institutions like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program or the Boy Scouts of America?
On and on and on, and in local communities all over the country and all the world, right?
You mean like the epidemic of female teachers who keep raping their male students?
We hear about it all the time.
Sexual abuse of children.
What's going on with men?
Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world?
Why do so many men rape other men?
What is going on with men?
And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abuse of men at pandemic rates?
Typical labor.
You know, they set up a ministry of rape and suddenly there are loads of rapists.
There are rape gangs roaming the streets.
They have rape parties.
There are rape night clubs.
In fact, there are rape dinner socials.
It's like it's a fashion.
Or it's like you're overblowing this by several orders of magnitude.
There is not as much rape going on as you are suggesting, is there?
Because this isn't about individual perpetrators.
That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem.
I really don't think you're in any position to be telling anyone else that they are naive.
You know, the perpetrators aren't these, you know, monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness.
That's a very naive notion, right?
On one hand, I want to congratulate you for getting there yourself.
On the other hand, I'm really pissed off that you spent all of your talk up until this point portraying men as exactly that.
Perpetrators are much more normal than that and every day than that.
So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world?
What are the roles of the various institutions in helping to produce abuse of men?
What's the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects and race and ethnicity and how that intersects?
How does all this work?
Okay, look, it's obvious that you don't know, right?
And so I'm going to postulate what I think is happening.
I can't back it up with any hard evidence or any numbers or statistics, but I think that these are actually the problem.
That these are the barrier to seeing what the issue is.
Right?
Now, like you were saying, men aren't just monsters that come out of a swamp, see a woman casually walking home from a nice evening doing charity work or whatever it is women do, and then grab her, brutally assault her, and then go back to their swamps.
Now, I'm sure that that does happen.
But as Jermaine Greer said, women get raped at home or they get murdered at home.
But the point is, the majority of women who are raped know they're rapist.
So I'm going to postulate that in the cases where it is a stranger raping a woman who doesn't know the person, it may well be for power, for the desire to see someone in fear, to suffer, and to violate them.
There may be a small minority of people who feel that way and who do that.
And that is incredibly wrong, obviously.
And what is also wrong is the other, the majority of rapes, which are someone they know.
And I bet that these rapes are caused by desire.
I bet they are caused by intense sexual desire for the person that the man ends up raping.
Now, I'm not trying to justify it in any way.
I'm trying to find the root actual cause so we can identify that.
Now, if that's the case, then that makes these men a lot less monstrous than they would otherwise appear if lumped in with the sexual predator who roams around the streets looking for victims.
Because it was unintended.
Spur of the moment, things got a bit hot and heavy, the guy loses control of himself, and I imagine feels fucking terrible afterwards.
So saying, oh, there are all these things that could contribute, and it's like, well, they might.
But fundamentally, I don't really think they do.
You know?
I think that family and upbringing is far more important to whether someone's going to end up being a rapist or not than the porn they watch or the video games they play or the school they go to.
I mean, you know, this is just conjecture.
I can't be sure of it.
But just from my experience in dealing with human beings in everyday life, I imagine that this is far more likely.
And then, once we start making those kind of connections and asking those important and big questions, then we can talk about how can we be transformative.
In other words, how can we do something differently?
How can we change the practices?
How can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes?
What definition of manhood involves it being okay to rape?
Oh, that's right.
Fucking none of them.
I may have mentioned this before, but this gets me into an argument I had with my feminist sister, which drove me up the fucking wall.
And she basically said, oh, yeah, well, men, men, you know, I can't remember exactly how she phrased it, but it was to imply that men idolize raping and beating and dominance of women and all this sort of stuff.
Basically listing the worst aspects of masculinity.
You know, in the same way that, you know, if you were to talk about women being sluts and whores and deceptive and backstabbing and bitchy and ostracizing, you wouldn't be holding up the ideal of femininity.
You'd be holding up the negative things that come with it.
There is no man who other men look up to who is a rapist.
These are the kind of questions that we need to be asking and the kind of work that we need to be doing, but if we're endlessly focused on what women are doing and thinking in relationships or elsewhere, we're not going to get to that piece.
Now, I understand that a lot of women who have been trying to speak out about these issues today and yesterday and for years and years often get shouted down for their efforts.
They get called nasty names like male basher and man hater and the disgusting and offensive feminazi.
That is not the reason they get called these names.
And they're not speaking out.
There is no persecution.
They are doing things to other people that other people do not like.
And talking about whether John beats Mary is not it.
Right?
And you know what all this is about?
It's a called Kill the Messenger.
It's because the women who are standing up and speaking up for themselves and for other women, as well as for men and boys, it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up.
Keep the current system in place because we don't like it when people rock the boat.
We don't like it when people challenge our power.
You better sit down and shut up, basically.
I feel like I've stepped through some sort of funhouse mirror where, in fact, there aren't laws against rape and abuse.
And in fact, it's mandated by the state.
It's on TV.
People are at arenas cheering a guy on as he rapes as many women as he can in a certain period of time.
You know, guys having rape competitions like gladiators or something.
But just involve as many women as they can have.
I mean, what are you fucking talking about, man?
Nothing you are saying at this point represents reality.
And thank goodness that women haven't done that.
Thank goodness that we live in a world where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that.
But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say, or better yet, we can be heard saying some things that women often can't be heard saying.
I'm going to guess they're all video game related.
For example, I recently discovered a Warhammer Fantasy mod for Mountain Blade.
Now, I'm telling you this because I can't think of any reason that he would be saying this.
I can't think of anything that women wouldn't say.
So I'm going to tell you about this awesome mod.
It's fucking kick-ass.
It's really, really well done.
It's called Warsword Conquest.
I highly recommend it.
I don't get too much time to play it, which is gutting, but I started as a Chaos Warrior, and it is exactly as you would expect.
It is perfect.
I start off with a crappy band of Chaos, you know, a crappy Chaos Warband, but you level them up, and eventually you end up with, you know, you upgrade them to Chaos Warriors, and then Chaos Knights.
The only problem I've got is that things don't stay as infantry, cavalry, or ranged.
So I'm a bit annoyed that my Chaos Warriors eventually become Mounted Knights.
I'm a bit annoyed that my axe throwers eventually become mounted axe throwers because I like to differentiate the squads.
So I'm probably going to make my own version of that mod at some point.
because I've done quite a lot of mountain blade modding it's it's really I don't do that many videos at the moment and I'm I I don't do anything else really because I've been working on Necromancer a lot.
So yeah, but I really do plan to make a mod where I'm just going to tweak the hierarchies of the units.
So you can end up with your top level unit being a Chaos Warrior, and there'll be your heavy infantry, and then the Chaos Knights, which will be your cavalry, and then the Elite Axe Throwers, which will be your ranged units for the Chaos Army.
I imagine that that'll probably need to be done for the other factions as well, because there are loads of factions.
They're practically every faction.
You know, you've got the High Elves, Dark Elf, Skaven, Undead, various human factions, Dwarves, Orcs, Goblins.
They're all in there.
It is so good.
I have waited my whole life for a game like this, and I'm thrilled about it.
So, um, back to the fucking complaining.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I thought that was interesting.
Now, I appreciate that that's a problem.
It's sexism, but it's the truth.
And so one of the things that I say to men, and my colleagues and I always say this, is we need more men who have the courage and the strength to start standing up and saying some of this stuff.
And standing with women, not against them, pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense.
Well, yeah, because you haven't presented it like that in any way.
You know?
But more to the point, I think it's more about guys standing up and looking stupid, which is what you're doing right now.
We live in the world together.
And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male.
What about all the boys who are profoundly affected on a negative way by what some adult man is doing against their mother, themselves, their sisters?
What about all those boys?
Yeah, and what about them?
What about all those boys who are certainly not abused by women in any way?
Because women are perfect angels and can do no wrong.
What about all those boys?
What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence?
You know what?
The same system that produces men who abuse women produces men who abuse other men.
And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims.
Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence.
And certainly never the victim of female violence.
Ever.
So that's something that both women and men have in common.
We are both victims of men's violence.
So we have it in our direct self-interest, not to mention the fact that most men that I know have women and girls that we care deeply about in our families and our friendship circles and every other way.
Which begs the question, why are you demonizing these men?
So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out.
It seems obvious saying it out loud, doesn't it?
Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture, in the U.S. military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender violence prevention.
And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach because it's a big sort of thematic shift, although there's lots of particulars.
But the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators, women as victims, or women as perpetrators, men as victims.
Look at how hard that was for him to even say.
For him to even think.
Hmm, well, I suppose there could be women perpetrators.
I mean, anything's possible, right?
Any combination in there.
I'm using the gender binary.
I know there's more than men and women.
There's more than male and female.
Is there?
Because it seems to me there are men and there are women.
And then there are men who become women or want to become women.
And there are women who become men or want to become men.
But either way, there are still only two fucking genders.
And there are women who are perpetrators.
And of course, there are men who are victims.
You know, there's a whole spectrum.
But I don't want to talk about those because it might undermine my message that men are evil.
Remember, John beats Mary.
Instead of seeing it in the binary fashion, we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders.
And a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation.
So in other words, friends, teammates, colleagues, co-workers, family members, those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse, but we are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation.
What do we do?
How do we speak up?
How do we challenge our friends?
How do we support our friends?
But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?
Now, when it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are.
Yeah, it's called white knighting, and it's just a method of infantilizing women and making sure they don't have to deal with the consequences of their own fucking actions.
Remember, like you said, these women choose these men.
The consequence of them choosing bad men is that bad things will happen to them.
They've got to fucking sack up and deal with that themselves.
This is what equality is.
It isn't pampering people because of the choices they make.
It's letting them be responsible for the choices they make.
And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women.
We're not just saying that men, a man whose boyfriend whose friend is abusing his girlfriend needs to stop the bo you know, the guy at the moment of attack.
I mean, that's a naive way of creating a social change.
It's along a continuum we're trying to get men to interrupt each other.
So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present, and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women.
But ultimately, quite funny, because that's the point of a joke.
It's not serious.
In fact, nine out of ten times, that's what makes the joke funny.
For example, I learned my first ever amusing rape joke the other day.
I don't generally find them that amusing, but I thought this one was good.
Here we go.
When polled, nine out of ten people enjoyed gang rape.
Instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it, we need men to say, hey, that's not funny.
You know, it could be my sister you're talking about, and could you joke about something else?
So we are agreed it was a joke then.
See, what you're saying is that men should be as big a bunch of killjoys as women, on the whole.
Sorry, women, but it's true.
And so you have completely submitted to female control of yourself.
If you want to make a joke that is offensive to some people, then go ahead.
Let them be offended.
Nothing happens when someone is offended.
They'd just say, oh, I didn't like that.
And then they go somewhere else and the emotion goes away and they're fine again.
Nothing happens.
And what you are suggesting is simply a way of getting this guy uninvited to these gatherings.
People are going to be like, no, don't bring him, he's a...
Oh, I told a joke and he got his panties in a bunch because his girlfriend's got his balls in a handbag.
And, you know, don't invite him next time.
It'll just be more fun.
Can you talk about something else?
I don't appreciate that kind of talk.
Just like if you're a white person and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope, that white people would interrupt that racist enactment by a fellow white person.
Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?
Yes, it is.
But you don't understand what I'm consenting to.
I'm not consenting to the rape or abuse of anyone.
I'm consenting to one of my friends telling a joke.
He knows it's a joke.
I know it's a joke.
Everyone else in the room knows it's a joke.
You are the only person who does not know that it's a joke.
And even then, I think you do know that it's a joke.
It's just you're a fucking mangina.
Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture.
A, telling jokes is not illegal.
And B, brilliant, well done.
You are proposing thoughts control.
You're proposing limits on freedom of speech.
Well done.
You're a fascist.
You're a totalitarianist.
You are in favor of totalitarianism.
You want to control what people think and say.
And you want to do it through these subversive means.
Oh no, it's doing a good thing.
You know, I'm sure that the Nazis said that about the Jews.
Getting rid of the Jews is a good thing for Germany.
Yeah, but you're still murdering millions of people.
Yeah, but it's good for Germany.
Yeah, but it's not good for the Jews, is it?
And if we can get to the place where men who act out in sexist ways will lose status, young men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways towards girls and women, as well as towards other boys and men, will lose status as a result of it, guess what?
We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse.
Yeah, but that'll never happen, and here's why.
What you are suggesting is obedience.
And no man really respects a man for his ability to be obedient.
Especially when there is no legitimate authority involved.
If anything, if anything, it will give the men who tell everyone else to fuck off a greater status.
Because they did what they wanted.
They, fundamentally, were MGTOWs.
You know, they didn't obey your rules that you have arbitrarily chosen that favor women and do nothing for the men involved.
This is the problem you face.
You go against the natural order of the world and you think you're going to win.
You're not.
You're only going to make groups of men who just don't give a fuck and have no investment in your system because your system is so set against these men.
This is the problem I personally am having.
I'm not in favor of abuse.
I am against the idea of abusing people.
But what you are proposing is so oppressive to me, I cannot consent to it.
It is so backwards to the idea of a free society that I am disgusted and repulsed by it.
This is why I make these videos.
Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted.
He's a normal guy in every other way, isn't he?
Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was, in the end, what'll hurt the most is not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
In the end, what'll hurt the most is not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children.
Yeah, it's probably something to do with men thinking that the issue has been settled when laws were passed against it, so that anyone who does it is now a criminal and should be punished to the full extent of the law.
Ergo, people who aren't doing it, shouldn't really need to do anything.
They've done their part.
In fact, my ancestors did their part.
And so, I mean, I agree with that.
So, you know, I don't need to do anything.
If someone abuses someone else, go to the police.
I can't imagine it being any more simple than that.
Hasn't there?
There's been an awful lot of silence.
And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence.
And we need more men to do that.
Now, it's easier said than done.
Because I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you, it's not easy in male culture for guys to challenge each other.
Bullshit.
Absolute bullshit.
I'm going to take my channel as an example, right?
Now, I've specifically gone out of my way to make sure that my channel is a male space.
You know, I don't care what kind of comments people put.
The only comments I won't allow is people saying, don't talk about something.
Because, you know, I'm sorry, anything can be talked about.
Right?
But the point is, you know, if a guy comes on and he says something that I wouldn't personally agree with, I don't moderate it.
You know, he had his reasons for saying it.
He had his stresses.
There's probably a good reason why he came to my channel in the first place.
You know, I know that I talk in quite an authoritative way.
You know, I'm strident and confident in my opinions.
But one of the first things people will do, if they disagree with something I've said, is they will leave me a comment saying, hey, I didn't agree with this point because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The first thing they do is challenge me on it.
The first thing.
And I welcome that.
Like that because a lot of them, I'm only human, I'm not perfect, believe it or not.
And you know, I often get carried away in the heat of the moment when I'm making this.
And afterwards, you know, I've said something like, okay, yeah, I agree.
I didn't really think it through, or I didn't really mean it, I was just being hyperbolic.
And I changed my position.
But if there's one thing that men do to each other all the time, it's challenge each other.
So I don't know where the fuck you've been hanging out, but it hasn't been with men, has it?
Which is one of the reasons why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen is not just understanding these issues as men's issues, but they're also leadership issues for men.
Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues should not fall on the shoulder of little boys or teenage boys in high school or college men.
It should be on adult men with power.
Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable for being leaders on these issues.
Because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture and challenges and interrupts, he or she is being a leader, really, right?
But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power to start prioritizing these issues.
And we haven't seen that yet, have we?
Yeah, maybe one of them can give a TEDx talk sometime.
Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago, and I work extensively with the U.S. military, all the services.
And I was at this dinner, and this woman said to me, I think she thought she was a little clever, she said, so how long have you been doing sensitivity training with the Marines?
And I said, with all due respect, I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines.
I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps.
Now, I know it's a bit pompous, my response, but it's an important distinction because I don't believe that what we need is sensitivity training.
We need leadership training.
Because, for example, when a professional coach or manager of a baseball team or football team, and I work extensively in that realm as well, makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there'll be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio, and some people say, well, he needs sensitivity training, and other people will say, well, get off it.
You know, that's political correctness, run amok.
And he made a stupid statement, move on.
My argument is he doesn't need sensitivity training.
He needs leadership training because he's being a bad leader.
Because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership.
I agree.
They are very silly comments to make, and they are failures of leadership.
You've finally got something right.
If we can make this point that I'm making to powerful men and women in our society at all levels of institutional authority and power, it's going to change.
It's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking.
You know, for example, I work a lot in college and university athletics throughout North America, right?
We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right?
There's no excuse for a college or university to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training mandated for all student athletes, coaches, and administrators as part of their educational process.
We know enough to know that we can easily do that, but you know what's missing?
The leadership.
But it's not the leadership of student athletes.
It's the leadership of the athletic director, the president of the university, the people in charge who make decisions about resources and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings, right?
That's a failure in most cases of men's leadership.
Look at Penn State.
Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach.
You had so many situations in that realm where men in powerful positions failed to act to protect children, in this case, boys.
It's unbelievable, really.
But when you get into it, you realize there are pressures on men.
There are constraints within peer cultures on men, which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures.
And one of the ways to do that is to say there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues.
I know this.
I work with men and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many, many decades now.
It's scary when you think about it, isn't it?
How many years.
But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues, but caring deeply is not enough.
That's right.
Caring deeply is not enough.
You also have to be stupid enough to realize that only one side is at fault.
This is the problem he's running into.
The people in these leadership positions, I'm not talking about the Penn State thing, I don't really know what that's about, and it doesn't matter.
Because the problem he's having is that people in these positions have a group, have a lobbying group coming to them and saying, we really want this because it will suit us better.
And they have to listen to the other people who say, well, it won't suit us.
Can we not just have normality where people are just normal and act normally and deal with things themselves and are left alone and leave each other alone?
Can we not have that?
But no, this is what happens.
We have one group that's like, no, you can't possibly say something I don't like and therefore I'm going to have to raise a lot of hell about it.
And it's just like, well, you're being a twat to other people then, because of your feelings.
We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women, not against them.
Yeah, what you mean is stand with feminists and not against them.
Because women, in my experience, just laugh it off or just be like, yeah, well, he's just being a dick.
Just get on with their lives.
But it's the feminists and the social justice retards who get their panties in a bunch, can't get over their feelings, and suddenly they have to make a fucking big deal out of it.
By the way, we owe it to women.
There's no question about it.
But we also owe it to our sons.
We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world in situations where they didn't make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way.
They didn't make the choice.
We that have a choice have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well.
I hope that going forward, men and women working together can begin the change and the transformation that will happen so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis.
I think your line of work has given you a really high degree of confirmation bias.
You know, you walk into work and think, yeah, I wonder if there'll have been any rapes yesterday or today.
Because, you know, I'm sure that men are just rapists deep down.
And then you get to your rape crisis center or whatever it is you do.
And you hear about all these terrible cases.
And you think, oh, this must be going on all the time.
But what you don't understand is it's like, you know, 10, 15 cases per 100,000 or million.
You know, it's based on a large population segment.
They've all got very intricate winding stories as to why these things have occurred.
And you think that there might be some kind of blanket way of dealing with it.
But there's not.
You can't stop criminals from being criminals.
It's just not possible.
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